Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has been suspended following a Channel 4 News report in which he was seen boasting of the company's ability to influence elections and avoid official investigations (The Register). Meanwhile, Facebook is struggling to adequately explain its long-term enabling of third-party apps that harvested information from users' accounts. Facebook's share value has plummeted and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton is one of many major voices calling for users to "#deletefacebook".

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A recently-published paper details the use of an experimental bacteriophage virus, OMKO1, to eliminate a life-threatening antibiotic-resistant infection that took hold in a patient's heart following aeortic repair surgery (Ars Technica). The bacteriophage, which originated in a pond near Yale University in the USA, attacks bacteria like the patient's drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection by targeting the bacterium's exposed efflux pump mechanism, used to remove antibiotics before they can harm the bacterium. The experimental treatment was a success, further proving the merits of bacteriophage-based medicine as antibiotic resistance becomes more prevalent.

European data protection supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli has issued a detailed and very timely opinion statement outlining the impact that major tech firms, and social media in particular, are having on their users and calling for the greater enforcement of European legislation intended to protect those users (The Register). Buttarelli highlights the impact of social media filter bubbles "resulting in increased political and ideological polarisation", as well as the chilling effect of government internet surveillance on free expression, and the kind of privacy and data protection risks so clearly evidenced by the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In 2016, Raivis Vaitekuns and his cousins Andris and Gundars Vaitekuns founded Solid Coffee, a Latvian startup making exactly that, in the form of a bar of coffee beans and cocoa butter called Coffee Pixels (WIRED). The Coffee Pixels bars are small - each is only 10mg - and come in foil packaging. There are two flavours, milk and cascara. Cascara refers to the remains of the coffee fruit, or "cherry", once the coffee bean is removed – a by-product that in some places is dried and turned into a kind of tea. If you haven't heard of cascara, you're not alone. In fact, it's not technically legal to sell it as a food product in the EU. This is because it is considered a "novel food", which means that it has no significant history of consumption in the EU before May 1997.

French gaming giant Ubisoft has finally seen off a looming hostile takeover threat from long-time rival Vivendi with a share deal in which Ubisoft, its founding Guillemot family, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Chinese gaming leader Tencent will between them buy all of Vivendi's 27.27 per cent stake in the company (Polygon). The deal will also prevent Vivendi from acquiring any more Ubisoft shares in the five years following the transaction's closure. Tencent will be buying a 5 per cent stake in Ubisoft and has formed a strategic agreement to "operate, publish and promote several of Ubisoft’s most successful titles on PC and mobile in the Chinese market" – it's also prohibited from increasing its stake in Ubisoft, which the company clearly hopes will prevent a recurrence of the Vivendi situation in the future.

Facebook data was contorted without user consent to put a candidate in the White House. That's not today's news — it happened in 2012. That Cambridge Analytica obtained scraped Facebook data for political campaigning wasn't revealed this weekend — it was first published in 2015.

WIRED 03.18 is out now. We go inside Didi Chuxing, the world's most valuable startup, which defeated Uber in China; meet the British couple who cost Google £2.1 billion, and go a little too deep inside the ICO bubble. Out now in print and digital. Subscribe and save.